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Credit Daniel Kukla

Life on the Desert’s Edge

By Jesse NewmanJul. 23, 2012Jul. 23, 2012

As one drives through Joshua Tree National Park in the comfort of an air-conditioned car, the large stretch of Southern California desert may seem parched and uninviting. Throughout the park, prickly cacti line the roadsides and granite monoliths tower in the distance. Plants look withered or dead, riverbeds are dry and few animals brave the blazing midday sun.

But Daniel Kukla, a budding art photographer with a background in biology, has a penchant for out-of-the-way places where life is hidden, fragile or under threat. In his series, “The Edge Effect,” Mr. Kukla reveals Joshua Tree as he sees it: the meeting place of two great American deserts — the Sonoran and the Mojave — each boasting a unique ecosystem and more biological diversity than anywhere else nearby.

For close to a month last spring, the Brooklyn-based photographer lived alone in a cabin in the northwest corner of the national park. Armed with a camera, a large mirror and a painter’s easel, he set out at dawn or dusk every day to document the forces — human, environmental and geologic — that give the park its variety and vitality. Each of the resulting tableaux feature one landscape mirrored onto the backdrop of another, creating two opposing scenes in a single visual pane.

In Mr. Kukla’s photographs, the diverse life-forms found on this protected patch of land become actors on their own stage. In one, tangled juniper trees and a volcanic mountain are mirrored onto two tall stands of a spiky plant called Parry’s Nolina. In another, a starry sky is reflected onto a pebbled wash (Slide 8), with the golden-yellow tips of a flowering shrub peering into the glass, reminding the viewer of the mirror’s presence. Then there is the photograph taken during a break in a spring thunderstorm (Slide 6) — menacing clouds hover in the east, while the mirror captures blue sky in the west, along with a second squall just beginning to spill over a distant mountain ridge. Like others in the series, the image stirs up a faint sense of foreboding, borne perhaps of an ability to see in two directions at once.

“The whole area has a really surreal feel to it,” said Mr. Kukla, 28. “At first glance the desert looks completely barren but once you get closer, you realize it’s incredibly diverse.”

Few regions in the United States offer a more striking example of the variation between high and low desert as the nearly 800,000 acres that make up the park. The Colorado Desert, part of the larger Sonoran Desert, sits below 3,000 feet in the southeastern half of the park. It is hot, dry and covered in snarled vegetation — like ocotillo plants and jumping cholla cactus — that looks like desert-variety coral. The Mojave Desert — which is higher and therefore cooler — stretches across the northwestern part of the park, and is home to the Joshua tree, the crooked, shaggy yucca plant for which the park is named.

Daniel KuklaJuniper Flats.

Mr. Kukla’s series, which will be exhibited in the park this fall, takes its title from these contrasts. “The ‘edge effect’ is an ecological term that describes the juxtaposition of two contrasting environments,” he said. “It refers to a transition zone, a dynamic area where species mix, and some things live while others die out.”

Mr. Kukla’s use of mirrors to capture the complexity of the park was inspired by hours spent in his rental car. He noticed marked differences between the view in front of him and the one caught in his rear- or side-view mirrors.

“As you drive through the park, you’re surrounded by impressive landscapes on all sides,” he said. “But the view differs depending on which direction you look. At dusk, all I could see in front of me was a dark night falling, but the rear-view mirror still held a beautiful sunset.”

Many of the sites he chose required hours of hiking over rugged terrain to reach — Mr. Kukla balanced the enormous mirror on his head as he walked. Reaching his destination, he arranged it until just the right image appeared inside its frame. “Subtle changes in angle threw the landscape within the mirror completely off,” Mr. Kukla said. “The reflection was constantly changing, depending on the light or weather.”

And he was constantly negotiating the elements: blistering heat, fierce winds and rare torrents of rain or snow. “The wind was a huge factor,” he said. “It destroyed a few big mirrors. I spent hours picking up tiny shards of glass from the desert floor.”

In Mr. Kukla’s Brooklyn apartment, a large, framed mirror stands propped on a wooden stool. It reflects an assortment of plants: a giant palm, a cactus cutting and an orchid on a strip of bark. According to Mr. Kukla, his artists’ residency in Joshua Tree sparked a personal transition as well as a professional body of work. Leaving New York City for the national park meant more than swapping a dense urban center for complete wilderness. It meant exchanging the comfort of human society for solitude and isolation; trading a fixed schedule for the chance to let a day to unfold as it would; and replacing electronic connectivity with the reach — and limits — of his own imagination.

The metamorphosis from city creature to desert dweller took time. At first, Mr. Kukla wore earplugs to bed at night. “The silence could be terrifying,” he said, but he grew accustomed to the strange noises and slower rhythms.

“The desert is very seductive once you open up to the experience. Ultimately, it was just me, the tools I had and nature. It was an amazing gift in that way.”

Daniel KuklaCoachella Valley.

Jesse Newman is a writer and photographer living in Brooklyn. She attended Columbia University’s School of Journalism and the International Center of Photography. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Newsday, Time and Newsweek Magazine.